“What kind of work do you do?”

“Anything I can get,” she said honestly. “I'm going to start looking tomorrow.”

“There's a lot of restaurants on Second Avenue, and all the German ones on Eighty-sixth Street. You might find something there.” She felt sorry for her. Gabriella looked tired and pale, and the landlady thought she didn't look healthy. But she didn't look like a druggie. She seemed very clean, and very proper. Mrs. Boslicki finally relented. “I got a small room on the top floor, if you want to take a look. Nothing fancy. You share a bathroom with three others.”

“How much is it?” Gabriella looked worried as she thought of her small budget.

“Three hundred a month, no food included. And you can't do no cooking. No hot plates, no double burners, no crock pots. You go out for dinner, or you bring home a sandwich or a pizza.”

It didn't look like a problem. Gabriella looked like she'd never eaten. She was rail thin, and her eyes were so huge in her thin face, it made the landlady think she was starving. “You want to see it?”

“Thank you, I'd like that.” She was extremely polite and well spoken, and Mrs. Boslicki liked that. She didn't want any smart-aleck kids in her house. She had been renting rooms for twenty years, ever since her husband died, and she'd never had any hippies either.

Gabriella followed her upstairs while Mrs. Boslicki asked her if she liked cats. She had nine of them, which explained the smell in the downstairs hall, but Gabriella assured her she loved them. There had been one who sat with her sometimes while she did her gardening in St. Matthew's garden. And by the time they reached the top floor, the slightly overweight Mrs. Boslicki was breathless, but it was Gabriella who looked as though she might not make it. The room was on the fourth floor, and Gabriella wasn't up to that yet. The doctor had particularly told her to avoid stairs and too much exercise, or carrying anything heavy, or she might start bleeding, and she couldn't afford to lose another drop of blood after all she'd been through.

“You all right?” She saw that Gabriella was even paler than she'd been downstairs, she was almost a luminous green, and she was moving very slowly.

“I haven't been well,” Gabriella explained wanly as the old woman in the flowered housedress nodded. She was wearing carpet slippers, and her hair was neatly done in a small knot. And there was something comfortable and cozy about her, like a grandma.

“You gotta be careful with some of the flus around these days. They turn into pneumonia before you know it. You been coughing?” She didn't want any boarders with TB, either.

“No, I'm fine now,” Gabriella reassured her, as Mrs. Boslicki opened the door to the room she was willing to show her. It was small and dreary and barely big enough for the narrow single bed, the straight-back chair, and the single dresser with the hand-crocheted doily on it. She had rented it for years to an old woman from Warsaw, who had died the previous summer, and she hadn't been able to rent it since then. And even she knew that three hundred a month was a stiff price for it. The window shades were worn and the curtains were old and a little tattered, and the carpet was nearly threadbare. She saw Gabriella's face, who had been used to the spartan cells at St. Matthew's, but somehow they hadn't been quite this depressing. And for the first time, Mrs. Boslicki looked a little worried.

“I could let you have it for two-fifty,” she said, proud of her generosity. But she wanted the room rented, she needed the money.

“I'll take it,” Gabriella said without hesitation. It was grim, but she had nowhere else to go, and she was afraid to lose this one. And she was so exhausted just from coming up the stairs that she wanted it just so she could lie down for a while. She needed a place to sleep tonight, but thinking of this as her new home almost reduced her to tears as she handed the woman half of Mother Gregoria's money.

“I'll give you sheets and a set of towels. You do your own laundry. There's a Laundromat down the street, and a lot of restaurants. Most people eat in the coffee shop on the corner.” Gabriella remembered walking by it and she hoped it wasn't too expensive. She only had two hundred and fifty dollars left now, but at least she had a roof over her head for the next month.

They walked down the hall then, and Mrs. Boslicki showed her the small bathroom. It had a tub with a shower over it, and a pink plastic shower curtain. There was a small sink, and a toilet, and a mirror hanging from a nail. It wasn't pretty, but it was all she needed. “Keep it clean for the others. I clean it once a week, the rest of the time you do it yourselves. There's a living room downstairs. You can sit there anytime. It's got a TV,” and then she smiled a little grandly, “and a piano. You play?”

“No, I'm sorry,” Gabriella apologized. She remembered that her mother did, but they had never wasted lessons on her, and at the convent she did other things, like work in the garden. She had never had any talent for music, and some of the nuns had teased her about her singing. She loved it, but she sang too loud and a little off-key.

“You get yourself a job now, so you can stay here. You're a nice girl, and I like you,” Mrs. Boslicki said warmly. She had decided that Gabriella was all right after all. She had good manners and was very polite, and she didn't look like she was going to be a lot of trouble. “You gotta take care of yourself though. You look like you been sick. You gotta eat right and get healthy.” She bustled down the stairs then, and promised to come back later with some towels, and Gabriella said she'd stop in to pick them up herself to spare her the stairs and the trouble. Mrs. Boslicki waved as she disappeared, still clutching Gabriella's money.

Gabriella walked into the small room again, and looked around. She sat on the uncomfortable chair, and wondered if there was anything she could do to cheer the place up. She could buy a few things when she made some money, but not for the moment. A new bedspread, some prints on the wall, some fresh flowers would work wonders.

With a small sigh, Gabriella set her small suitcase down in the closet, and hung up her other dress. There was something else in her valise, her journal to Joe, which she left in the suitcase without looking at it. And it made her sadder now to realize that he had never seen it. She took it out, finally, unable to resist it, and sat down on the bed and opened the little book. It was filled with her notes about their meetings, and her love for him. It was brimming with all the excitement of first love, and the exquisite terror of their first clandestine meetings… and then further on, the passion she had found in his arms in the apartment. It was all there, right up to the end, talking about the life they would share, and at the very end it talked about the hopes that she had for their baby. And as she read the last entry, a letter fell out on the bed next to her, and she realized that she had never seen it. The envelope said “Sister Bernadette” in an unfamiliar hand, and then she realized with a start it was Joes writing, and she trembled as she opened it. It took a minute to understand what it was. It was his suicide note, the last thing he had written to her before he died by his own hand. Father O'Brian had left it with Mother Gregoria and she had slipped it quietly into the journal before she gave it to Gabbie. But Mother Gregoria hadn't warned Gabriella that it was there, and she touched it now with tears in her eyes as she read it. It was so strange that he had touched this paper only days before, that he had held it in his hand, that it was the only thing she had left of him. Just these words, carefully written on two sheets of white paper.

“Gabbie,” he began, the “Sister Bernadette” on the envelope had only been so that the letter would find her, and ultimately expose all their secrets. Without that, they might never have known, and she might still be at St. Matthew's. But that was done now, and there was nothing left to do but live with it. She couldn't go back now.

“I don't know what to say, or where to begin. You are so much better and more wonderful, and stronger than I am. All my life I have known how weak I am, what my failings are, how many people I have disappointed… my parents when Jimmy died, because I could not save him.” No matter that his brother had been two years older and far stronger, it was the younger brother who blamed himself for the heroic miracle he had been unable to accomplish, and perhaps they had silently blamed him, and if they had, she hated them for it. “I have disappointed everyone, people who knew me and loved me and counted on me. It is, ultimately, why I came to the priesthood. If I had not been such a disappointment to them.” He was talking about his parents again, and knowing him as she did, she understood that. Reading the letter was like listening to him, and it tore her at the heart now. She wanted to tell him how wrong he was, to convince him to stay… If only she had been there that night… if he had told her what he was thinking when she last saw him…

“Maybe if I hadn't been such a disappointment to them,” he went on, “or made a difference in their lives, my mother wouldn't have done what she did when my father died. She would have known that I would be there to help her. But she didn't. She preferred to die than live without him.

“But when I went to St. Mark's, they gave me everything I'd never had, all the love, all the chances, all the understanding I needed. They had so much faith in me, they forgave me everything, and I know how much they loved me, just as I know how much I love you now, and you me. These have been the only certainties in my life, the blessings I cling to, even now, in my darkest hours.